Gears of War: Anvil Gate

by Karen Traviss

  Marcus gave him the slow stare. Prescott let go of his arm.

  “Dynamic risk assessment, Chairman. Better than having a riot.”

  Dom hung back with Sam for a few seconds, ready to wade in, but Prescott said nothing and walked off. Hoffman confronted Marcus.

  “Think I couldn’t handle it, Fenix?”

  “Don’t carry the can for Prescott,” Marcus said quietly. “Makes it harder to get civvies to listen to you next time. Let them focus on the Chairman. It’s his job to be disliked.”

  The set of Hoffman’s jaw softened. Dom knew the old man well enough to know when he was taken by surprise.

  “Okay, carry on saving my ass,” he said at last. “Three times, and you get to keep the trophy.”

  “Nice job,” Sam said as Hoffman walked off. “He respects that.”

  “Terrific.” Marcus’s attention was already on something else. “Ahh, shit. What is this, fight night?”

  There were still a lot of people hanging about, some of them Stranded women and kids who’d accepted the amnesty. A gaggle of them had blocked the path of a bunch of Gorasni troops. Dom didn’t know what the uniform was—militia, maybe—but it didn’t seem to matter to the Stranded. They were spitting mad, and Dizzy Wallin was standing between the two factions making take-it-easy gestures.

  “You murdering assholes!” one of the women yelled at the Gorasni. “Why don’t you fuck off back to your own country?”

  “Ladies, let’s remember we got young ’uns around,” Dizzy said. “And you fellas—you wanna be seen fightin’ with girls? Everyone just relax.”

  “Shut up, garayaz,” one militiaman snapped. It was one of few Gorasni words Dom had picked up: heap of shit. “You’re one of them.”

  Dizzy took a step back. “That ain’t nice.”

  “Here we go,” Marcus said.

  Dom, Sam, and Marcus started a slow jog across to the argument, but it all got out of hand in seconds. One of the women gave a Gorasni the finger. The Gorasni lunged at her and almost hit one of the kids, a girl about ten. Then Dizzy stepped in to defend the kid, a bunch of Jacinto civvies dived into the melee yelling abuse at Dizzy, and punches were being thrown, all in the five seconds it took for Marcus to cannon into the ruck and force everyone apart. Sam got a smack in the face as she pushed the Stranded women away.

  Dom didn’t see if she threw a punch back. He was hit from behind—could have been accidental, but he didn’t care—and the next thing he knew he’d pinned one of the Jacinto contingent against the nearest wall. The yelling stopped.

  Marcus had one of the Gorasni in a headlock.

  “Don’t piss me off,” he said. “I missed my anger management class today.”

  Dom let the civvie go and stood back. Dizzy still shielded the terrified kid, and this was the first time Dom had seen him lose that permanent patient good nature. Maybe the risk to the little girl had done it. Dizzy had two teenage daughters, and they were his life.

  But he turned on the Jacinto civvies, not the Gorasni.

  “We fought for you,” he said, like the idea appalled him now. “I abandoned my girls for you. Damn it, I busted my ass killin’ grubs, and I still ain’t human enough for you? You ain’t worth it. All you see’s this damn hat and a bit o’ dirt, and we’re all the same. All assholes. Vermin. Well, fuck you.”

  Dizzy ran out of steam and let the kid rush back to her mother. It was so unlike him that even Dom was lost for words for a few moments. The man didn’t seem so much angry as hurt. But the outburst put a stop to the fight. Sam moved in.

  “Come on, Diz.” She draped her arm around his shoulders. “Let’s go and have a glass of your vintage kidney-killer. I’m choosy who I drink with.”

  Marcus stood glowering until the crowd slunk away. Dom sloped his Lancer on his shoulder, waiting for the next flashpoint.

  “One big happy family.” Marcus’s shoulders sagged as if he’d taken a big, silent breath of despair. “Better check if Baird’s come up with the goods.”

  There were bound to be tensions when you were rebuilding a whole planet, Dom thought. Relief at simply surviving didn’t last long. People only seemed to unite when there was a clear threat to rally against.

  Maybe Baird could put a name to one for them.

  BOATHOUSE 9, VECTES NAVAL BASE.

  Baird had never failed in his life. He aced every exam; he invented gadgets while waiting for the average kids to catch up with him on the page. He had never doubted his own abilities.

  Until now. Now he was wondering if he was half as smart as he thought he was. The wreckage from Harvest was spread out on the floor, each section roughly where he thought it would have been before it blew up, the way accident investigators sometimes reconstructed Raven crashes.

  Not that we didn’t know what caused them. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred—Reavers, Brumaks, and grubs that got lucky.

  There was a lot of boat missing. All he had was a few sections of hull, splintered and peppered with bullet holes.

  Something wet splatted on his head. He looked up; a couple of seabirds had taken to roosting in the rafters. He was too engrossed to bother shooting them, and just moved position to sit on a crate out of the birds’ range.

  “Sit there long enough and you’re gonna be caked in bird shit,” said a voice behind him. It was Jace Stratton. “You think the Stranded got some tech we don’t know about?”

  Baird didn’t turn around. He’d never been sure what to make of Jace. The kid was all right, a solid soldier, and maybe that was all he needed to know. Baird could also tell that Jace thought he was a dick, but then most people did, and Baird hadn’t given a fuck about anyone else’s opinion for a long time. Trying to please people never paid off.

  “No, I don’t,” Baird said at last. “Because if they had, they’d have used it by now. And if they have fancy tech, they’d had to have stolen it from us. There’ll be a boring reason for all this.”

  “What’s the connection, then?” Jace asked. He didn’t take the unspoken hint to get lost. “The two trawlers, or the latest trawler and the frigate, or all three?”

  “Damn, I forgot to pack a forensic engineer.” Baird slid off the crate. It was giving him a cramp in the ass anyway. Jace was a useful sounding board if nothing else. “Got any ideas? Don’t think it makes you my boy detective sidekick or anything.”

  Jace gave him a yeah-whatever look and stood studying the pieces. The biggest section of hull, about the size of a couple of lunch trays, was still attached to part of the keel. Jace lifted the chunk of white fiberglass composite and flipped it over in his hands.

  “I know how to do this,” he said. His voice echoed in the cavernous space. “I’ve seen it on TV. They lay out the bits and try to reconstruct it.”

  “Man, the benefits of education.”

  Jace just gave him a look and carried on. Baird awarded him points for persistence. All that was left of Harvest was this glass fiber and plastic—no machinery, no bodies, no nets, no fabrics. If they’d recovered the engine or any of the fuel system, Baird might have been able to rule out a fuel explosion. You couldn’t smash a trawler to bits just by shooting it up. It would have taken more than that to sink Harvest.

  He picked up one of the smaller pieces and examined the edges, and realized he couldn’t tell the difference between scorching caused by burning fuel or by the heat of an explosion. The ragged edges didn’t clue him in, either.

  “Which way around does this go?” Jace said. He held up a chunk of flat glass fiber composite peppered with bullet holes, then flipped it over. “This way or that?”

  And that was the best damn question anyone had asked in a long time.

  “Good point.” Baird took the section out of his hands and tried to work out which side had been in contact with the water. There wasn’t enough curve in the sheet to work out which part of the hull it came from, and both sides looked pretty shitty with encrustation. “There’s more crap on this side, so I’m guessing this way up.”r />
  The ragged bullet holes had to have a direction.

  Baird took off his glove and eased a finger into one hole to see if splinters snagged his skin. Yeah, he could feel it. When he pulled back, his finger slipped out easily. He tried it a few more times with another hole. When he held the sheet under a light and tilted it carefully, he could see a slight bowing around the holes.

  “Shit,” he said. “The shots came from inside the hull. Not from outside. It wasn’t shot up from the outside while it was capsized, then.”

  “Is that a big deal?” Jace asked. “Doesn’t tell us much.”

  “It tells me plenty.”

  “Okay, pirates might have boarded the boat. And they might not. You know how everything goes to rat shit when the shooting starts in confined spaces. How many of our guys got killed by friendly fire? Do these fishermen generally go out armed?”

  Yeah, Jace was right. It didn’t prove anything. But that was another good question nobody had asked before.

  “Let’s ask them if they went out cannoned up. It’s not like they’ve got a lot of firearms washing around up there.”

  Jace nodded. “They’re boarded, they squeeze off a few rounds, they hole their own vessel. Game over.”

  “But what blew the shit out of it?” Baird examined the splintered edges of the sheet. It had the same feathery tear lines he would have made if he’d ripped up fiberboard. The splaying suggested the force of the blast went outward. “You got to do more than hit a fuel line. It’s not like the movies. You need a buildup of flammable vapor or something to ignite and explode.”

  “Hey, is this going to be the multiple factor thing you go on about? You know—it’s never one thing that causes catastrophic failure. It’s a lot of them all at once.”

  Jace was really getting into this. Baird felt chastened by the realization that Jace listened to him and learned. That didn’t happen too often.

  “Could be,” Baird said. “Doesn’t explain the confetti today, though. Or a steel-hulled warship having a negative buoyancy moment.”

  The doors creaked open. Marcus and Dom ambled in, followed by Trescu and Hoffman. The colonel was wearing his keep-this-asshole-away-from-me look.

  “I’m charging admission,” Baird said.

  Marcus contemplated the wreckage. “Got anything?”

  “Something we should have checked earlier. Shots fired from inboard to outboard.”

  “And?”

  “Probably followed by an explosion inside the vessel. Can we skip all the movie scenarios? They didn’t just put a hole in their own fuel line. Something else went wrong.”

  Trescu wandered around with his hands clasped behind his back as if he was doing an inspection.

  “I’m a rational man,” he said. “Very big ocean, very few vessels. Three sink in the space of a few months. All very different. Random statistical clusters are for clerks. So I will assume a common element until proven otherwise. Yes?”

  “I thought your frigate holed herself on an underwater obstruction,” Hoffman muttered.

  “Indeed she did,” Trescu said mildly. “But how did the obstruction get there?”

  “Where? You don’t have an accurate last position for her.”

  “That,” Trescu said, “is why I am keeping an open mind about exonerating our garayazka neighbors too soon.”

  “If they’d done it, Commander, they’d be ramming it down our goddamn throats,” Hoffman said. “It’s not them. That much I’m sure of. Maybe there’s another pirate contingent. They’re always having territorial disputes.”

  Nobody said grubs. Nobody needed to. The new answers had just thrown up more questions.

  “Screw this,” Baird said, embarrassed that he hadn’t solved the puzzle completely. He found himself checking Marcus’s expression for signs of lost faith. However much people disliked Baird, he knew that they trusted his expertise. “If there’s some shit out there, let’s go find it. I’ll volunteer. Got another tub you can do without?”

  Trescu stared at Baird and Baird stared back.

  “You Gears go out every day with the fishermen. Where is your new strategy here?”

  Hoffman seemed to have had enough. “The trawlers can fish closer to the island until we get a handle on this, with a couple of Gears embarked on security detail,” he said. “Inside the maritime exclusion zone. I think we can trust En-COG to maintain that. And if you happen to remember any little details about your frigate’s demise, Commander, don’t forget to tell us, will you?”

  Hoffman turned and strode for the doors. It was a pretty eloquent command to follow him and get on with something useful. Baird piled the pieces of hull back on the nearest pallet and left with the rest of the squad. Trescu headed off on his own toward the Indie submarine Zephyr, probably to polish his jackboots or something.

  “If they had a submarine, we’d have detected it by now,” Dom said. “I mean, that’s the only thing that could take out Levanto without being seen, right?”

  “Don’t believe all that submariner bullshit.” Baird liked tinkering with the systems in Clement, but he had no illusions. “They can’t find half as much as they let you think they can.”

  “Yeah,” Dom said, “but they can blow stuff up okay. That’s how this crap started, remember. If Zephyr hadn’t torpedoed Darrel Jacques, we’d have a treaty with the gangs now and he’d be keeping them in order.”

  Baird decided that Dom had spent too much time wandering around Stranded camps looking for Maria. He’d picked up a bad dose of tolerance for them. Jacques would have turned out like all the rest, and nobody really knew how many Stranded were still scattered around Sera.

  The COG was just a small city now. The last thing it needed was to make concessions to criminals.

  “That’s our job,” said Baird.

  FUELING PIER, VECTES NAVAL BASE: NEXT DAY.

  Bernie’s heart sank as she picked her way down the slippery steps of the pier wall and looked at the trawlers bobbing beneath her on the swell.

  She really didn’t feel up to being bounced around in a noisy tin box that stank of fish and fuel oil. She wished she’d let Hoffman reassign her. But that was more than an admission of defeat. It was a surrender to old age. The moment she accepted lighter duties, she would begin that slow—or not so slow—decline into frail senility. She didn’t want to hang around and fade.

  “Where’s the puppy, Boomer Lady?” Cole leaned on Montagnon’s rail. “Thought you two was inseparable now.”

  “Whining his head off in one of the old fuel compounds with half a sheep carcass until I get back.”

  “You sure that ain’t Baird?”

  “No, Mac’s the one with worms.” She saw Baird tinkering with the trawler’s winch mechanism. “A mother always knows.”

  Baird straightened up and fixed her with his blank look. “Talking of parasites, has Trescu the Terrible beaten anything useful out of that Stranded brat yet?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Hoffman tells you everything, Granny. I mean, I used to think it was your joints creaking when I passed your quarters, until I realized it was mattress springs …”

  There’s a lot Vic doesn’t tell me. She let the jibe pass. “I suppose we’ll know when we stop finding bloody big craters in the roads.”

  Bernie jumped down onto the concrete platform that ran just above the low watermark. Marcus stood with one boot on a bollard, looking like he was getting ready to slip the lines on Coral Star. Dom and Sam were rostered to go with the smallest boat, just known as M70. It needed a quainter name, Bernie decided.

  Marcus gave her a glance, made no comment about being last to muster, and waited for her to negotiate the shifting gap between the boat’s ladder and the pier wall. She pulled herself up through the gap in the side rail and stepped straight into the wheelhouse.

  Aylmer Gullie, the elderly skipper, sat in the cockpit seat with a mug of something steaming in his hand.

  “Okay, Sergeant Fenix, slip the lines.” There was
a loud thud as Marcus jumped across from the quay. Gullie pulled back the throttle. “You really think this is going to be any safer?”

  “Maybe not,” Marcus said. “But at least we’ll know more if we’re here instead of watching you detonate from two klicks away.”

  “Optimist.” Gullie winked. “Don’t worry, we’re staying inshore.”

  Inshore for Vectes meant twenty kilometers, the limit of the island’s volcanic shelf. The three trawlers chugged out at near their top speed, a modest eighteen kph, and there wasn’t a lot for Bernie to do except walk around the limited deck space and keep a lookout. The four crewmen were busy below. She sat forward of the brightly painted derrick that made the trawler look like it would capsize at any time, and regretted having so much time to think.

  What the hell is so bad that Vic’s taking this long to tell me about Anvil Gate?

  The worst thing was that she’d started imagining just what he’d have to do to make her despise him. She’d killed two men the hard way in absolute cold blood. Her threshold of unforgivable was set generously high.

  Not violence, then. Something small. Something cowardly. No, that’s not Vic. Foul temper. Thoughtless, sometimes. But cowardly? No.

  Marcus wandered out and looped an arm around one of the derrick supports. He stood there for a full fifteen minutes, staring out across the waves in total silence.

  Eventually he murmured, “Shit.” But he said it to himself, not as a cue for her to ask what was bothering him. There were moments when she wanted to ask him how he handled what Hoffman had done to him—utterly out of character, unthinkably callous—but she knew Marcus too well to have any hope of an answer.

  He stood there for another fifteen minutes, still silent, then turned and went aft.

  What the hell do he and Anya say to each other?

  Bernie forced herself to change the subject. It was nearly two hours into the trip before she heard enthusiastic chatter behind her and saw one of the crew training his field glasses on a flock of seabirds diving and dipping into a patch of water.